Junior Software Engineer (AI-Forward)

Job description

As a Junior Software Engineer with Texas Sports Academy, you'll help build the software that runs our school, student records, academic mastery tracking, training data, parent portals, admissions, and the AI-powered tools our guides and coaches use every day. This is an early-career, AI-forward seat. You'll work directly with the founders and senior engineers, ship code every week with AI in your loop, and grow into the LLM-powered features that make our school feel nothing like a traditional school.

What You Will Be Doing - Building and shipping product features across the full stack every week, with AI coding tools running alongside you. - Contributing to real LLM-powered product features: tutoring agents, parent-facing copilots, coach-facing dashboards, retrieval over student data, and the evals behind them. - Working directly with the founders and senior engineers on scope and trade-offs, no PM layer in between. - Picking up ownership of smaller systems end-to-end and growing into bigger ones. - Running your own AI coding workflow, prompts, subagents, custom tools, MCP servers, and getting sharper at it every week. - Writing evals and regression tests for AI features the same way you'd write unit tests for classical code.

What You Will NOT Be Doing - Pretending AI is optional. If you're not already coding with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or an equivalent agent loop, this role is not for you. - Sitting in status meetings all day. Few meetings, more shipping. - Working on a narrow slice of a giant codebase. - Waiting around for tickets. You'll be in the room when we decide what to build.

Key Responsibilities - Ship production code and AI features that real students, parents, and staff rely on every day. - Own smaller systems and features end-to-end as you ramp up. - Move fast. Features go from idea to production in days, not quarters, without breaking things. - Level up your AI-engineering chops alongside a senior team.

Requirements - Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or Physics. - Based in Austin, TX (or within commuting distance) - 0 to 2 years of full-time engineering experience. Strong internships, side projects, and shipped personal work count. - Daily, fluent use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Aider, or equivalent) as your default way of writing software. - Comfortable in a modern web stack (TypeScript / React / Node or Python / Postgres / AWS or GCP). - Excellent written English.

Nice to Have - At least one shipped LLM-powered project, school project, hackathon, or side project, with some kind of eval story. - Agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, Mastra, custom), vector search / RAG, evals (Braintrust, LangSmith, custom), prompt caching, MCP servers, structured output / tool-use, or voice agents. - Public GitHub or a personal AI project we can actually try. - A personal project you built because you wanted to. - Background in education, edtech, or sports.